Drying Dung

[Savanik]

There's been a lot of talk about Dung and the Drying Rack. To sum up, if Dung is supposed to be used to cook food in wood-poor areas, why use a machine that you can use to cook food in the first place?

I propose the following alteration. Allow dung to dried on the ground. Here is you how implement it.

Manufacturing project, semi-finished project.

Dried Dung
Tools required: none
Objects: x grams of Fresh Dung
Days required: ?

The reason all the quantities are X'd out is because it really depends on how many grams you'll need for cooking (which I don't know yet). The only thing to be certain of is that you'll end up with much less Dried Dung than Fresh Dung, seeing as you've driven all the water out.

That's the basic idea, though.

Sav

[Thetaris]

I know little about the new dung process and how it got in etcetera, and it's uses, but I must disagree with you here- what is the use of it? We aren't exactly going to eat dung in real life unless we're in a mountain kind of area with nothing else...

[Savanik]

I believe we're going to use it to cook other foods with, such as meat, and eventually potatos and carrots. In order to be used in that way, first it has to be dried. (Presumably.)

Sav

[Sho]

I'm witholding final judgment until RD comes out and tells us how dung is supposed to be dried. But as far as it goes, I don't really like this suggestion - it's not scalable, and it's substantially different from all the existing manufacturing projects, all of which output an object, not a quantity of resources.

[Okud]

Cooking meat, salting meat, and many others, are projects that output a quantity of resources, not objects.

[Chris Johnson]

I think what Sho meant to say is that all projects where resources are an output require a machine - Those examples require a smoker or salting barrel, iron requires a smelter etc.

Manufacturing projects don't always require a machine or tools , but their output is limited to objects as opposed to resources .

[Wolf]

After doing some googling, I found out that drying dung is still a common thing in several parts of the world.
But now I finally found some possible implementations:

http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/69368.html
(picture of dung being dried against a wall)
Apparently, in India, Tibet and another place which I found an article about earlier, the dung is stuck onto a wall to dry in the sun.
Judhging from the picture I linked to here, and some other pictures, these walls tend to be white, and generally have good exposure to the sun.
In the case of this picture, the wall is one of a building, but at least one short article elsewhere possibly implied that in some places, small communities actually build a single wall with the sole purpose of having a place to dry dung.
I say that at least this one article "possibly implied", because it didn't specifically say that it was the case, but it coined the word "dung-drying-wall", without mentioning a building attached to it.

And I may have come across some additional uses for dung:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4271820.stm
Bio-gas, also replacing wood as a fuel to cook on... and this might also add a new use for water.

http://jeq.scijournals.org/cgi/content/full/34/2/598
Phosphorus in dung of grazing cattle, might be a little addition to other sources of phosphorus.
(I couldn't read the full article because I'm not a subscriber)

[formerly known as hf]

I'm gonna repeat my suggestion from before...

Let's dispense with the whole 'dung needsa to be dried' thing...
Instead of listing recently 'created' dung as 'fresh dung' - it should just be listed as 'dung'

This 'dung' can then be used as a possible fertiliser if farms / gardens etc. are ever introduced, and as a fuel

There should be absolutely NO need to do anything extra to dung before it can be used.
If it's meant to be a simple, cheap, inefficient means of cooking - keep it simple and cheap by not having to add an extra process in being able to use it for cooking...

[wulf]

I like the idea of dung being ready to use but just very inefficient. Of course that raises the question of whether the presence of animals should generate an automatic supply of dung without having to slaughter them but I think we could live with that as long as you can do something with it.

Wulf

[formerly known as hf]

that's the plan - but it requires extra programming, this is the best we can do for now...

[Jaguar45]

Drying dung sounds fine to me. It doesn`t take forever to dry the dung and it is free. If it was ready to use, it would make things too easy. The moment you just happen to land a killing blow on an animal, you have food - since you get both meat and the means to cook it. So keep drying, but make it possible to use the dung for cooking. One of my characters is running low on food and has no wood, but has collected a nice amount of dung.

[Sunni Daez]

Well, if in fact it needs to be dried, a Dung Drying wall can be built out of stone...and function the same as a salting barrel or a drying rack...just add the dung and tend it till it drys I suppose...

[Pie]

............ Actually, i have a caracter that has seen dryed dung.

[BlueNine]

............ Actually, i have a caracter that has seen dryed dung.

I have a character that IS drying dung

[Peanut]

My char helped make 750g dryed dung.